Religious and Spiritual Experience - Jack Hunter

Religious and spiritual experiences are just one of several different ways that people might come to hold religious beliefs. Some people are born into religious life, their parents, family and wider community teach them about religion from an early age and they live their lives through the teachings of that religion. Other people convert to a religion because they marry someone of a different faith, or because they are dissatisfied with the teachings of the religion they grew up in. And still others come to believe through direct, personal, religious or spiritual experiences, which change their whole worldview.

But what exactly are religious and spiritual experiences?

Put very simply, religious and spiritual experiences are types of experience that suggest the existence of a higher power, or of spiritual realities. Religious experiences are not limited to a single religious tradition, and could potentially happen to anyone.

Can you think of any kinds of experience that might be thought of as religious or spiritual?

Miracles (unusual events thought to be caused by the power of God, or gods), visions (such as visions of the Virgin Mary in Catholicism), vivid dreams, audio and visual hallucinations, prayer, synchronicities, and so on...

Religious and spiritual experiences can be spontaneous, or they may be deliberately induced. Some people might be going about their normal every day lives, when all of a sudden something will happen that makes them change their understanding of reality, perhaps a highly unusual coincidence, or a particularly vivid dream. Many people have reported that while out for a walk in the countryside, for example, they have suddenly felt an intimate connection with the natural world, and others have heard voices in their heads that have saved them from dangerous situations, which they have interpreted as the voice of God/s or other supernatural beings. For others, religious experiences are deliberately induced through intensive rituals, or through deep meditation and prayer.

Many religious traditions have groups who actively seek to develop religious and spiritual experiences in order to bring them closer to their God/s. These are called mystical traditions, and include, for example, the Sufis in Islam, and Kabbalah in Judaism. Experience is also a major feature of many traditional forms of shamanism and small-scale religions.

Religious and spiritual experiences may take a variety of different forms. The German scholar of religion Rudolph Otto used the term numinous to describe religious experiences, and noted that such experiences can be both fascinating and terrifying at the same time. Some people experience a feeling of great love associated with their religious experiences, while others feel a sense of awe, and even fear.

These kinds of experience can only be called religious or spiritual if they are interpreted that way by the person who has the experience. The American psychologist William James suggested that an experience could be classed as genuinely religious if the person is morally and spiritually transformed by the experience, he called this the fruit of the experience.

It is very difficult to study religious and spiritual experiences directly because they are subjective, which means that only the person having the experience can really tell us what is happening. It is possible to study peoples descriptions of their experiences, though, and then look for patterns within and between these descriptions. From this kind of research it has been possible to find surprising similarities between descriptions of religious experiences, despite differences in cultural interpretation. These similarities are often referred to as the common core.

More recent research has tried to find out what is happening in the brains of people having specific kinds of induced religious and spiritual experiences, using a variety of high-tech brain scanning equipment. This research has shown that religious experiences are often associated with quite unusual activity in the brain.

Of course there will always be questions about the reality of religious experiences because they are usually entirely subjective. There are other explanations for religious and spiritual experiences that do not lead to a religious interpretation. For example could religious and spiritual experiences be explained by unusual brain activity, or is unusual brain activity just what happens when people have a religious experience? Are religious and spiritual experiences just the product of imagination, or could they be misinterpreted normal experiences?

What do you think?